Dell Inspiron 15-7000 Review

The Dell Inspiron 15-7000 comes with a sultry and more adult look that is sure to turn heads. But more than that, the notebook does a pretty solid job of straddling the fence between gaming and entertainment, offering a serviceable Core i5 processor with a mid-level Nvidia GPU. In short, the Inspiron 15 7000 Series is putting its money, performance and battery life where its mouth is and heavy multimedia users and gamer lovers should pay attention.

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Design

The Inspiron 15-7000 has a matte black lid, with soft-touch finish that’s accented by a glossy fire-engine-red Dell logo in the center. It’s daring yet demure, enticing you to take a closer look. If black doesn’t do it for you, the Inspiron 15 also comes in a stunning Hibiscus Red.

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You’ll find more of that sensually silky material gracing the palm rest, extending its inky tendrils around the keyboard deck. The power button is located above the right corner of the num pad below a black metallic speaker grille with red inlay. The right side of the laptop features a single USB 3.0 port, HDMI, a 2-in-1 card reader, Gigabit Ethernet and a Kensington secure lock slot. On the left are a pair of USB 3.0 ports and Jackson for a headset and power.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The keyboard of the Inspiron 15-7000 does not gives a bouncy feedback while typing, as a result, your average typing speed might get slow while typing on the laptop. The Inspiron’s island-style keyboard doesn’t do the latter, delivering a measly 1.25 millimeters of key travel with 58 grams of force actuation.

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As for the touch-pad, it is for sure that size definitely matters. The Inspiron 15-7000 gives lightly over the large 4 x 3.1-inch touch surface, pinch-zooming in and out of articles with smaller print and quickly highlighting interesting passages with plenty of room to spare.

When tested for its color reproduction capabilities, the Inspiron 15 produced 70 percent of the sRGB gamut, which is good for a budget notebook but not great for a multimedia machine like this. The average laptop registers 82 percent. The Dell scored a ho-hum 4.1 on the Delta-E color accuracy test (closer to 0 is better).

Graphics and Audio

The Inspiron 15-7000 comes with Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M GPU with 4 GB of video memory. The laptop can definitely play current titles such as Fallout 4 or Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain — just not always at the highest settings.

The laptop delivered 88 fps on the BioShock Infinite benchmark on low at 1080p, which falls below the 94 fps mainstream average. At the highest settings, the system registered 35 fps, which is definitely playable, but below the 54 fps average.

The trend continued on the Metro: Last Light test, where the Inspiron hit 58 fps on low at 1080, missing the 76 fps average. The notebook finally tapped out when the settings were cranked to maximum, causing the laptop to produce 17 fps.

For those moments that you aren’t craving a new civilization out of the ruins of the irradiated past, the laptop will automatically switch over to the integrated Intel HD Graphics 530 GPU.

Performance

The Dell Inspiron 15-7000 is powered by a 2.3-GHz 6th-Gen Intel Core i5-6300HQ processor with 8 GB of RAM ably streamed an episode of Master of None on Netflix while Fallout 4 played in a separate window with eight open tabs in Google Chrome, all while running a system scan.

The laptop scored 8,800 on the synthetic Geekbench 3 test, which measures overall performance. That’s enough to top the 8,531 mainstream average with a decent amount of points leftover. The Inspiron’s 1 TB 5,400-rpm hybrid hard drive gives you a lot of space for games and content, but not much speed with its 8 GB Flash cache.

It took 2 minutes and 27 seconds for the drive to duplicate 4.97 GB of multimedia files, resulting in a 34.6 Mbps transfer rate. That is much lower than the 167 Mbps average. (A version of this notebook with a faster 128 GB SSD paired with a 1 TB drive costs $1,299.)

The Inspiron 15 regained its footing during the OpenOffice Spreadsheet Macro test, where it matched 20,000 names and addresses in 3 minutes and 58 seconds. That was fast enough to leave the 5:26 average in the dust.

Battery life

The Dell Inspiron 15-7000 Series held its own as per the Laptop Mag Battery Test. It lasted 6 hours and 45 minutes of continuous Web surfing over Wi-Fi, soundly beating the 5:43 category average.

Verdict

The price of Dell Inspiron 15-7000 starts from $799 which is approx Rs 54,000 approx.

It’s hard to be good at one thing, so it’s nice to see that the Dell Inspiron 15-7000 has a handle on several. The machine’s mid-tier graphics delivers pretty solid frame-rates, too, while its battery life puts most gaming laptops to shame. However, we do wish the Inspiron 15’s display were brighter, which is an integral part of the entertainment experience.

There are more powerful (expensive) 15-inch systems out there that consumers can choose from, such as the Toshiba Satellite Radius P55 4K (starting at $1,399) and the even pricier Razer Blade (starting at $2,199) for more hardcore game lovers. But at $799, the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 Series is a solid bet for gamers and multimedia fans searching for a powerful machine that won’t damage their bank accounts.